


Starseed

by EricFenton



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:07:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23217493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EricFenton/pseuds/EricFenton
Summary: Starseed is an idea I explored a few years ago and has come up again a few times in writing prompts.  Those responses are stored here, mostly so I know what's already been said.  These aren't complete stories, each is only the length of a Reddit post or two and I'm not sure which, if any, I might want to come back to.
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

The Starseed project began with a relatively simply stated objective: Spread life, and humanity, across as much of the galaxy as possible. A single first stage, the _New York_ launched from a construction facility in Earth orbit with a population of a half million, accompanied by a robotic probe named _Liberty_. When the probe arrived at the destination star system thirty five years later it began construction of a new ship, the _Roma_ and a new probe, _Romulus_. When the _New York_ arrived thirty five years after that half the now million person population offloaded onto the _Roma_ and the two ships and probes headed off in different directions.

So far I've spent about seventy years aboard each _New York_ , _Roma_ , _London_ , _Athenai_ , _Teotihuacan_ , _Reykjavik_ , and _Constantinople_. We're going to run out of Earth cities eventually, we've already had an _Istanbul_ and I hear one of the next generation ships will be called _New Amsterdam_. I give it two or three more generations and I'll be able to convince someone to name one _Gotham_.

Just so you know, it's not common to live on board more than two ships. Some people manage three, but just barely. I'm not normal, I'm not mortal. I'm not sure how I got this way, it's been a while and I guess it didn't seem that important at the time. I walked the earth for about a thousand years that I can recall before I volunteered to board the _New York_. Competition to be one of the lucky 500,000 was tough, but eternal youth has its benefits. I aced every mental and physical requirement and just had to fabricate some credentials.

I like to keep a low profile, I'm just along for the ride, you see. Every decade or so I need to move around, change my job and position and where I live on the ship. It's why I always volunteer to transfer to the new ship when it's time, so much easier to get lost and start over in the shuffle there. It does keep getting harder, though. A population of a million gives you room to move around, but computer records are hard to fabricate and harder to completely eliminate, even with access. Sometimes people check.

It takes years, even decades now, to transfer information from ship to ship. For the _Constantinople_ to send anything to the _Orleans_ is still less than two years but a one-way message to the _Jinan_ takes about forty. Still, science and mathematics move forward and data compression improves in ways previously unimagined and each one-way transmission includes more and more data.

Including medical records relayed from the _New York_ to the _Constantinople_. Records which include the genetic information of each original volunteer. Records which are being examined and compared to current citizens to see what the effect of seven generations in space is.

Which brings me here. Someone noticed the exact same person was currently living on the _Constantinople_ who had boarded the _New York_ when it left Earth. I guess it had to happen eventually. It probably didn't help that I usually don't bother changing my name. Which really hardly matters, but if you were living in space and had the surname of "Kirk" would you change it?

Between the DNA evidence, the results from my medical examinations, and the holographic scans; there's no denying it. One downside of eternal youth is that stuff never changes, I've been an ideal specimen for nearly two thousand years now. Obvious question, will the medical technician who found out believe that I'm a magic immortal? Sounds like science fiction, but we live on a space ship.

Of course, there are things about human nature that just don't change. I've got an easy way out. I'm an ideal physical specimen with thousands of years of experience, loose morals, and low standards. I'm immune to disease, heal from all injuries, and can't have children. It's a simple solution to convincing people to stay quiet, but hey, it worked the last three times.


	2. Chapter 2

The Starseed project began with a relatively simply stated objective: Spread life, and humanity, across as much of the galaxy as possible. A single first stage, the _New York_ launched from a construction facility in Earth orbit with a population of a half million, accompanied by a robotic probe named _Liberty_. When the probe arrived at the destination star system thirty five years later it began construction of a new ship, the _Roma_ and a new probe, _Romulus_. When the _New York_ arrived thirty five years after that half the now million person population offloaded onto the _Roma_ and the two ships and probes headed off in different directions.

I was born aboard the _Orleans_. We're within communications range of our parent ship, the _London_. By relay we can reach our sister ship, the _Athenai_ and her daughter ship, the _Teotihuacan_. A one-way transmission to anyone further back than the _London_ takes decades by relay and there is no guarantee of a response.

We do still get messages though, it just takes twenty years to hear from the _Delhi_. Last week the final decision on sixth generation ship names went out. In another ten years the _Orleans_ will catch up to _Jean d'Arc_ for resupply and will rendezvous with the _Philadelphia_ and _Franklin_. They've also already started deciding what the seventh generation will be called.

There is one place nobody's heard from in centuries. We know that Earth existed. Everyone has seen footage of the _New York_ leaving dock and our records are full of information about it, but does it still exist? What of our records is fact and what was fiction?

Nobody knows.

Some claim that Earth was destroyed by a disaster or that humanity finally wiped itself off the face of the planet, that we're all that remains. Others claim that humans on Earth have ascended to another form of life and don't need communication anymore and that they'll soon come and share their secrets with us. Another theory is that the _Echo-1_ relay failed, making communication with Earth impossible, and nobody there cares enough to replace it.

For the most part it doesn't matter. Earth is a legend and has as little impact on our lives as the cities and figures that we name our ships and probes after. It is a thing to discuss with friends over wine, it is not real.

Each ship is self-sufficient, needing only to pick up supplies every seventy years. Most of what we transmit to each other is little more than letters between cousins, transcripts of new plays or songs we've written, and technical papers from the various labs. The further apart the ships get the more important it becomes to cram information into tighter transmissions.

My name is Cécile, I'm a mathematician and communications specialist. This is the story of how a legend became real.

* * *

You can tell a lot about someone by their favorite theory about Earth. The cynical are apt to blame mankind's arrogance while the spiritual claim some form of ascendance occurred; the pessimistic blame a cold and uncaring universe while the pragmatic claim a simple technical failure is more likely.

Most communications, except between ships that are only a few years apart, are broadcast through relays to the entire Starseed fleet. The relays use laser pulses to communicate to the next two relays or the next two ships and computers aboard each ship translate into standard formats. Anyone who wants to can see the messages, given the decades that can pass between sending and receiving one there's hardly a reason for secrecy. There is always a header indicating where the message originated and which relays it passed through.

Of course, there are many ways a message can be garbled; random events in one of the relays, interference in the signal, translation errors; usually the computer can sort this out. Sometimes it makes things worse. When that happens we often need to examine the signal itself and look for a pattern to the interference. One time it turned out there was no interference, for some reason someone from the _Kyoto_ decided to send out a paper about a new compression algorithm that had been encoded using that algorithm.

One day a short signal came across my desk. It was complete gibberish as far as the computer was concerned, using none of the common encoding schemes. The computer couldn't even figure out what type of data it was meant to be, there just wasn't enough of it to understand and there was no header indicating the point of origin, just a string of six relays it had passed through.

I was tempted to call it nonsense that had been picked up by one of the relays, but there were two oddities about the signal that caught my attention. It had passed through the _Echo-1_ relay, making it the first message to have done so in over three hundred years. That alone demanded investigation.

The second oddity was that there did seem to be a pattern to the signal, I just couldn't piece together what the pattern was. It didn't make sense. The signal had taken minutes to complete and yet most of it seemed to be nothing. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize why it looked like nothing, I had instinctively gone to the speed a computer communicates at. Here there were fluctuations in the signal that really were just noise. It wasn't until I decided to display the entire signal on one screen that I realized what I was looking at.

There were sequences that could be broken down into 50 millisecond units, with pulses of one to three units in length separated by a one, three, or seven unit gap. Someone had literally just turned their communications laser on then off in sequence. Assuming the short gap was a break between letters and the long gap was a break between words yielded:  
".... . .-.. .-.. --- / --. .- .-.. .- -..- -.-- .-.-.- / --. .-. . . - .. -. --. ... / ..-. .-. --- -- / . .- .-. - .... .-.-.-"

I stared at the screen, " _C'est impossible._ "


	3. Chapter 3

The Starseed Project began with a relatively simply stated objective: Spread life, and humanity, across as much of the galaxy as possible. A single first stage, the _New York_ launched from a construction facility in Earth orbit with a population of a half million, accompanied by a robotic probe named _Liberty_. When the probe arrived at the destination star system thirty five years later it began construction of a new ship, the _Roma_ and a new probe, _Romulus_. When the _New York_ arrived thirty five years after that half the now million person population offloaded onto the _Roma_ and the two ships and probes headed off in different directions.

At least, that's what they taught us in history class.

I was born aboard the _Tenochtitlan_ , as were my parents and their parents, who lived on the _Kyoto_ before that. We've lived in space, counting the ships my ancestors lived on between the _New York_ and the _Tenochtitlan_ , for over four hundred years. This we all learn in school. When _Tenochtitlan_ encounters _Quetzalcoatl_ at the next star system we will begin the process of transferring half the crew onto the new ship. I'll be graduating around then, and despite how much my mother complains that she'll miss me, I think I'll transfer. Anthing's better than hanging around with the jerks from school.

I was walking home from class when the first announcement sounded. Though we live on a ship, the living areas are designed to keep its artificial nature hidden. Ours looks how I imagine ancient cities must have, the sky is too far above to see and buildings cluster around streets made for walking. The only indication of our ship's true nature is that the trains take you up and down, to moving in or out of the massive, rotating cylinder we live in.

"Begin Stage Three," Came the archaic voice. I knew the accent from ancient recordings. The signs and public terminals all displayed the same message, but no explanation. What was "Stage Three" and why did some old recording want us to start it?

Most of the people around me were glancing around, just as confused as I was. A few others looked shocked, or scared, or excited. I tried asking one of the older men if he knew what was going on. "Just check The Manual," he told me.

The Starseed Resident's Manual was the original book given to the first inhabitants of the _New York_. It wasn't exactly a bible, but it was a very old and very important book, which hardly anyone ever read. I pulled it up on my textbook and flicked through the contents.

**Chapter One: Outline of the Project** , looked like a good place to start. I skimmed a few pages before I found what he'd mentioned:

> Stages of the Project:

>   1. Initial Testing: Prototype living environments constructed within the solar system will demonstrate readiness for long-term human survival in deep space. Robotic construction vehicles in outer solar system will prove construction probe readiness prior to full-scale implementation. Unmanned probes to nearby star systems will prove engine readiness.
> 
>   2. Multiplication: Robotic probe constructs new vehicle and probe and destination star system. Upon arrival, now doubled population splits between two vehicles and two new target destinations are determined. Stage Two repeats as necessary. Vehicle and population count is projected to double every 75 +/- 25 years, resulting in a 90% chance of project success and initiation of Stage Three in under 500 years.
> 
>   3. Discovery and Landing: Upon discovery of a suitable terrestrial body, probes begin construction of permanent settlement and necessary orbital infrastructure. Population disembarks. Permanent human extrasolar colony established.
> 
> 


Wait... I reread the page. We were going to rendezvous with... a planet? What was life on a planet even like? Did I want to find out?


End file.
